Bali, Plastics, Snoop Dogg and Climate

From Plastic-Laden Waves to Global Climate Change: What’s the Untapped Lever in Saving Our Planet?

Image: Farhana Huq

After a month’s travel through Fiji as the first leg of my nonprofit sabbatical, I planned to head to a place not only where I could surf more waves, but where I could afford to spend out the rest of my sabbatical time. Bali came highly recommended by someone in my network who had visited the island and loved it. Admittedly, I had also read the book Eat, Pray, Love and noted the way the author revered Bali as a magical place of healing and introspection as she struggled to make sense of her midlife crisis.

I was not in a midlife crisis, per se, but in search of some respite after the stress of running a nonprofit which often led to me being chronically ill and fatigued. I was also really wanting to improve as a surfer. And well, Bali was a mecca for waves. Surfers the world over flocked to it like pilgrims to a shrine. And so, I decided to join in on the “surf pilgrimage” and headed East towards this tiny island.

Upon arrival, I was picked up by a van from the surf camp I’d be staying at and transported to what looked like a small, Balinese-style, college surf scene. The camp had an abundance of palm trees and tropical greenery, two stories of rooms with dark wooden, outdoor corridors that overlooked a pool of shimmering blue water.

The weather was hot and humid as you’d expect in a tropical climate. The people of the scene were mostly a mix of bright blond-haired, young Germans and brown-skinned Balinese surf guides and workers. It was strange for me to see so many people from a mostly landlocked country so into surfing. But then again, Jamaica at one point did have its own Olympic bobsled team, so there’ve been stranger things.

Outside the coast, the Balinese landscape expanded into palm tree-lined roads bordered by spikes of green grass and thick patches of dark green trees. In some areas the land would drop off forming a bowl of tiered rice fields. It looked as if someone had carefully laid patches of golf course green turf in rhythmical patterns at each level. There were roadside stalls displaying fruits of varying colors methodically placed to form the shape of an inverted cone.
As you’d drive from the lush interior towards the small coastal towns, the landscape would shift drastically. Noisy motos carrying multiple people weaved in and out of standstill traffic amidst a lot of car honking.

Though I was appreciative of being able to take in Bali with the company of my new, barely out of college friends from the camp, I was most excited about the arrival of my best surf buddy, Blanket, who’d be joining me in the weeks to come.
Blanket and I had met three years prior at a Costa Rican surf camp. When this petite woman with a high-pitched voice, pale white skin and chestnut brown bob introduced herself, I immediately thought she was a secretary. She had a grounded, polite, organized vibe about her, carried a light spirit, and had an unexpected irreverence and humor that made everyone chuckle.

One evening while in Costa Rica, we ventured to the beach after camp. Blanket wanted to go for a swim and I wanted to hang on the beach to watch the surfers. As the sun set, I noticed Blanket had not yet come in from her swim. As I contemplated heading back to camp, hoping I’d find her there, she emerged from the distance, hair disheveled. She had been swept by a rip far beyond the lineup of surfers. Fortunately Cliff, a lad from our surf camp, saw her. He ended up paddling her to shore on his surfboard, with a view of Blanket’s ass in his face the whole way. Needless to say, she lived to celebrate her next birthday, which happened to fall on the very next day of her heroic rescue from sea. After that experience, Blanket and I would become best surf buddies. If I was headed to a place in the world to surf, she was the first I’d ask to go with me.

Once Blanket finally arrived, we’d spend the first part of our trip in the Southwest area of Bali at various camps with local guides helping us access waves. Then our plan was to head south to the Bukit Peninsula, a drier area of Bali where steep stone cliffs offered sweeping views of a clear blue sea.

In Bali, the primary mode of transport are motos. However, I refused to ride one the entire time I was there because of the number of accidents I not only heard about prior to my trip, but witnessed in my first few weeks on the island. Given the array of moto-gone-wrong tales, we decided to rent a car for our trip South. We’d be staying right in front of a place called Uluwatu, home to a world class surfing wave and to one of Bali’s sacred Hindu temples.
I was the designated driver on the ride down, but I had never driven on the other side of the road before. The further we got into the trip on the windy coastal road, the more I noticed Blanket’s face cringe. “Uhm, I think you’re getting too close to the shoulder,” she said with a bit of fear. How could that be? I thought. It felt like if I went any further to the middle of the road, I’d be in oncoming traffic. Whilst immersed in my own perspective, out of nowhere we heard a loud bang. I looked over at Blanket, who now had an additional layer of wrinkle to her facial cringe. “What was that?” I said.

“Uhm, I think you hit something,” Blanket replied, halfway to terrified.

I pulled the car over to the side of the narrow coastal road. We got out and looked behind us, trying to figure out if and what we might have hit. There was a construction site with 30 or so Balinese workers in blue jumpsuits on the side of the road just behind us. One of the workers, a frail, elder Balinese man, started walking towards us. He was holding something in his hands. As he approached with both hands out, he presented to us our passenger side mirror, as if bestowing on us a ceremonial fruit plate. He smiled with a nod. “Terima Kasih,” I said, the words for thank you in Bahasa. The rest of the workers looked on in wonderment at the bizarre situation. Utterly embarrassed, we got back in our car and continued on to our destination a bit shaken up, but relieved nothing living was hit.

We arrived in Uluwatu to our villa which overlooked the steep, rocky cliffs of the famed surf break Uluwatu, a series of fast, left-hand waves that broke over a shallow reef. Though the break was too advanced for us to surf at the time, our Balinese surf buddied Deny and Gede came up and together we ventured to more manageable spots (Blanket driving).

One day we went to a beach break to surf. Apparently, back in the day it was only accessible via foot and hatchet in order to cut away foliage to clear a path to the sea. By our generation’s time, it had large parking lots, a hotel, steps leading to a restaurant deck and bar and a brick laid path enabling easy access to a beach, now full of local and foreign beach goers.

Whilst in the parking lot of the hotel, a giant tourist bus full of Indonesian high school students pulled in. As they disembarked, the kids pointed their fingers at Blanket and walked towards her. Mesmerized by her pale skin, they lined themselves on either side of her, and asked me to take a photo. I had already turned several shades darker brown from surfing, so was of no aesthetic or novel interest to them. In fact, our Balinese friend Gede, who was with us at the time, once looked down at his arms in disgust after a surf session together, remarking how dark and ugly they had become in the sun. One time I asked my Balinese surf guides why there were hardly any Balinese girls surfing. I was told it was because their skin would become too dark and they would not be considered pretty. Colorism was rife in Bali. And I could relate. It triggered my own inferiority complex from childhood where I was made to feel ugly due to my brown skin.

With Blanket feeling like a circus animal wherever we went because of her pale skin (which she wished wasn’t so pale) and my inferiority complex flare up because of my brown skin, we were quite the motley duo. Still, we continued our exploration and took a break from the surf world.

We went to the local temple and interacted with the cheeky monkeys who did not hesitate to steal your possessions in return for paying a local Balinese person to get it back from them with a bribe of food. We also ventured a bit to the center of Bali to a place called Ubud. However, it made us feel as if we could be in California. There were smoothie bars, internet cafes and yoga studios abound. We did manage to see a Gamelan performance, the traditional music and dance of Bali. We’d sometimes see ceremonial processions in the midst of traffic mayhem.

Though glimpses of traditional Bali would shine through its curtains of industry, we were bummed at its over-commercialization. Compared to the wildness of Fiji, Bali somehow felt, well, taken over.

While I had planned to stay there through the remainder of my sabbatical, I decided that when Blanket left, I’d leave too and come back to Bali after a month’s time. It seemed I needed a break from the very place I came to for a break.

By the time I reunited back to the Island of the Gods, the rainy season had arrived. Temperatures were more pleasant and the water cooled as well. I managed to settle in a room in a shared house in a quiet rice farming area next to a lovely Balinese family away from the noise of camps.

Ibu Rai, the petite matriarch of the family who wore glasses and pulled her shiny black hair into a low ponytail, would come by from time to time to say hello. She’d watch with curiosity as I played my tablas, North Indian drums, and practiced classical North Indian dance on my porch. I’d show her some of the Hindu influenced elements of the dance, which she seemed to recognize due to the strong Hindu influence on the island. Though she did not speak a word of English and my Bahasa vocabulary was very limited, somehow we were able to connect.
My surfing improved a lot during this time. I got my first board shaped there, a 7’1” with a zebra pattern on the bottom, a supposed defense pattern to ward off Indo-Pacific sharks. One day, I went to surf a beach break on the Southwest side with my zebra board. As I paddled out to the spot and thrust my hand through the murky, blueish water, I noticed first a potato chip wrapper, then, an empty, white Dannon yogurt carton, then an upside down, broken flip flop, more wrappers, and more small plastic items.

With each paddle of my arm, I was moving not just through the water, but through a pile of plastic trash.

My Balinese friends explained to me that during the rainy season, all the trash from Java gets washed down polluting the ocean and beaches. It was, in short, gross. I’d spend out the remaining month surfing through plastic.

Though I found some tranquility tucked away in the rice farming neighborhood, I still struggled to find my footing in Bali. I felt sad how my Balinese friends internalized their darker skin as being ugly, a sentiment with which I could personally relate. I felt strange not seeing locally owned surf camps. I felt concerned at the amount of plastic pollution in the waters. These experiences would end up influencing a platform and concept in the years to follow I would come to name ‘brown girl surf’ that Blanket would help me launch.

Though Bali was not at all what I thought it would be, it certainly elevated my consciousness to larger issues, making me aware of the stark gaps that existed between tourism, environmentalism, and sustainable development.

It has now been over a decade since my trip to Bali. Since then, I started reading about how ocean plastics have disintegrated into microplastics, tiny plastic particles ≤ 5mm, and the swaths of trash gathering in gyres across the oceans. A few years ago, I started to read more articles on how plastics were entering our food systems. Just last month I read news on how researchers are discovering microplastics in our brain tissue and other organs. Is it safe to say that since my trip to Bali, we are, quite literally, becoming more plastic?

According to the OECD Global Plastics Outlook Database, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled. Most is classified as mismanaged, landfilled or incinerated. (See graph below.) What’s worse, according to a recent article in Science, forecasting models predict the migration of microplastics into our environment could rise by 1.5 to 2.5 times by 2040 if we keep running things the same way. If greenhouse gases are considered the unseen existential threat in climate, microplastics are right behind.

It’s one thing to end up in places on our travels where we feel out of place. As a surfer from the Global North, I have the privilege of being able to cross borders to come and go. It’s quite another thing for plastics to end up out of place. They’re there to stay in our food, water and air, stealthily ricocheting themselves back to us as a reminder of the lack of forethought that went into their design.

The solutions since have been to refuse, recycle (not very effective as noted above), reduce, or reuse plastic, design alternative replacements to it, influence policy and change social practices around it. It’s a given climate solutions are most effective if driven by frontline communities, like the organization Bye Bye Plastic Bags, formed in 2018 by two pre-teen Balinese girls to clean up and ban plastics on their beloved island. But when microplastics cross borders, infiltrate our water, air and food systems, isn’t the frontline community, well, the whole world? Who then are those best positioned to influence the levers of culture change at such reach?

Selena Gomez, the famous singer, actor and influencer, launched a line of cosmetics, one of the main sources of microplastics, to her half a billion Instagram following. So did Hailey Bieber, wife of Justin Bieber (Selena’s first love) with her 50 million following. Though Selena is committed to using recycled plastics in her packaging, these mega influencers are still adding to the microplastics problem in the name of beauty. And the teens are following. My dear friend’s 15-year-old daughter has twice attended a local program designed to educate girls on environmental stewardship and conservation. Despite the good intentions of the programming, and her love for the ocean and scuba diving, what store can’t her mom keep her out of?

Sephora.

Perhaps a sleeping lever in the climate movement needed to accelerate the existing levers at play, is in who can make behavior change towards plastics sexy enough to follow. Perhaps it’s high time for climate to reign in “sexy” — to get those figures on board to way show the behavior changes needed within the context of their own lives (and products!) at mass scale. The organization, Sustain Movement, is already getting the ball rolling by calling attention to social media as an under-explored approach to environmental communications.

If Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart can champion a culture of appreciation for the Olympics, and Taylor Swift can inspire half a million people to check out vote.gov in 24 hours from a single post, what’s then possible for those with global sway to accelerate the behavior changes we need to sustain our planet when the frontline is, well, all of us? Perhaps the very mechanisms that are exacerbating the addictions to the problem are the very things we need to reverse it.

Inspired by travels to Bali, Indonesia in 2010.

Farhana Huq is a Social Entrepreneur, Executive Coach, Global Explorer, Terra.do Fellow and Founder of @browngirlsurf